Why Are Three Americans Still Being Held in Iran?

June 27, 2007 — -- Amnesty International is lobbying for the release of three American scholars of Iranian descent now being held in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran.

There is little chance, however, that Amnesty's appeal will have any impact on Iranian authorities, who are currently engaged in a widespread crackdown on civil society inside Iran.

The best known prisoner is Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, a distinguished professor and director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for scholars in Washington, D.C. She is also very well known to me, a friend for more than 25 years.

Esfandiari and I met when we were both living in Tehran in the early '70s under the regime of the shah. I was a freelance journalist and she was a writer and academic, married to a professor, Dr. Shaul Bakhash, and with a young family.

When my husband, the BBC reporter John Bierman, was expelled by the shah for reporting on unrest that his regime was attempting to suppress, Esfandiari and Bakhash were the only Iranians brave enough to come and see us as we hastily packed up our belongings. I remember Esfandiari pointing out the cars parked on the street near our house, saying that Savak (the shah's secret police) was watching our every move. And of course, Savak was watching Esfandiari and Bakhash too.

Esfandiari fled Iran during the revolution in 1979 and she and Bakhash built successful and distinguished academic careers in the United States, both becoming American citizens. But Esfandiari would return to Iran from time to time to visit her family, especially her mother, now age 93.

It was on her last visit in December that she was ambushed by masked armed men who seized her belongings, including her passport. When she applied for a replacement, she was subjected to daily interrogation by Iranian intelligence officials about U.S. programs on Iran, and put under virtual house arrest. On May 8 she was taken to Evin prison, where she has been in solitary confinement ever since.